One of the new features is the Sky Q Touch Remote:
This remote (like many other new generation remote controls) uses Bluetooth as the primary control mechanism. It also supports infrared for controlling TVs/AV receivers/etc - and oddly infrared also plays a role in the Bluetooth pairing process.
The other key change is that the main touch pad area and the rewind - play/pause - fast forward area are all touch sensitive. So clearly this remote has a bit more going on than other remote controls.
It didn't take me long to decide to take it apart. The first step is to remote the battery cover and batteries, but it's not immediately obvious what the next step is, there are no screws.
It turns out that the top and bottom of the front of the remote use simple friction fit pegs:
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All that is necessary is to gently tease them apart evenly - I used 4 finger nails to repeatedly pry at each side, one side at a time. If you are not careful you will snap the pegs. The white areas you can see on the photo are where I snapped 3 of the pegs. (Personally I think the top piece looks a bit like an evil cat.)
Once you've removed those covers the main PCB (which has all the buttons including the touch areas on it) can be removed. Here's a shot of the bottom of that (click for larger image):
You can see:
Red: STM32F051C8U6 - 32 Bit Microcontroller - ARM Cortex-M0, 48 MHz, 64 KB, 8 KB
Green: TI CC2541 - SimpleLink Bluetooth Smart MCU, including an 8051 microcontroller
Purple: Activity LED - mounted upside down!
Orange: Two IR emitters
Yellow: Microphone
Blue: PCB trace Bluetooth antenna
The remote has a serious amount of processing power, with two separate microcontrollers. It seems likely that Sky picked the STM micro controller mainly because of it's built in support for capacitive sensing channels that are presumably used for the touch input.
The remote seems to be based on a design by ruwido. It's not too clear who manufacturer the remote control - the CE Conformity Declaration lists the manufacturer as Sky CP Limited, but the PCB and the ribbon cable to the touch sensors are both ruwido branded. The only place Sky appears on the whole remote is the Sky button on the front panel! My bet would be that ruwido manufacturer the majority (if not all) of the remote.
The remote seems very clever; rather than having a hardcoded set of IR code, according to the below page new infrared definitions can be fetched by the Sky Q box from a central database and downloaded to the Touch Remote:
http://advanced-television.com/2016/04/26/ruwido-boosts-sky-q-viewing-experience/
Overall, I do like the engineering that has gone into this remote - it seems like a good quality bit of kit.
